Requirements and Prerequisites of Experimentation

Several key enablers of Experimentation must be considered if an ExO is to fully implement this attribute:

• MTP. We’ll say it again: A company’s MTP must guide all Experimentation. Otherwise, there’s no guidance for asking the right questions.

• Company culture. Cultivate an environment that accepts the right kind of failure, recognizing that it contributes to experience and gathers all learnings. Experimentation requires a CEO and a board of directors (supporting the CEO) who understand and support a culture of Experimentation, the associated risks, and the potential for sequential (small) failures along the way to success. 

• Dashboards.It is critical to track experiments via Dashboards to measure outcomes.

• Autonomy is a critical enabler of Experimentation. General Electric famously trained 60,000 managers in lean startup thinking—the biggest corporate training exercise in the history of business. And the initiative mostly failed because they didn’t implement autonomy alongside it. (Nor did they operate under the guidance of an MTP.) Experimentation inside an organization cannot survive without Autonomy (more on this in the following chapter).

Time and money. Experimentation requires sufficient timespans and budgets. Often, business leaders get frustrated after the first cycle or two and shut down the project, leaving great ideas an iteration or two away from fruition. Today, as the cost of experimenting drops, time will be the gating factor.